Lene Rachel AndersenLene Rachel Andersen

bildungkeepgrowing

Lene Rachel Andersen

Report to the Club of Rome

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bildungkeep growing

byLene Rachel Andersen

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Bildung – Keep Growing

© Lene Rachel Andersen & Nordic Bildung, 2020

www.nordicbildung.org

ISBN: 978-87-93791-08-4

E-book ISBN: 978-87-93791-10-7

Design: Ulla Holger, Petit Bureau, and Lene Rachel Andersen

Print: Scandinavian Book

Danish version ISBN: 978-87-93791-09-1

Danish e-book ISBN: 978-87-93791-11-4

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Foreword from the Club of Rome 7

Executive Summary 9

The Author’s Preface: Humanity at a crossroads 11

The Human Spirit: Making life meaningful 17

About bildung 20

About the book and our opportunities 20

Bildung & Emotional Development: Philosophy vs. Psychology 23

Psychology and ego-development 24

Epistemology 34

Bildung and German philosophers 34

Comparison: developmental psychology vs. bild ung 56

Layers of bildung and ego-development 60

Folk-bildung and the Nordics: The Danish Spring 63

Folk-bildung in Denmark 64

Nordic folk-bildung 81

Three phases of Nordic folk-bildung 82

More and Better Bildung: A new understanding 85

Cultural codes and societal transformation 85

Freedom and responsibility 91

Nationalism, patriotism and national chauvinism 95

Circles of belonging 108

The Bildung Rose 118

Pushbacks 130

What bildung and lack of bildung look like 132

A Future of Bildung: Suggestions and a bigger perspective 139

What does bildung feel like? 140

Metamodern education and bildung 142

Metamodern formal education 143

Folk-bild ung 3.0 148

The best investment is in people 154

A rose garden society 158

Sources 166

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forewordBy the co-presidents of the Club of Rome

The publication Bildung - Keep Growing by Lene Rachel Andersen has been

accepted as a Report to the Club of Rome. This book is a thoughtful and

thought-provoking guide to enable humanity to re-focus on what is es-

sential and to understand life-long learning, education and thinking as a

unifying force. It is rich in comparisons between the phases of Develop-

mental Psychology and Bildung as a complex interplay between individ-

ual development, learning and collective culture. Importantly, this book

has a regional, European narrative but a global ambition.

Bildung is here presented as a tool for personal development into a

self-authoring stage that enables one to function as a confident respon-

sible citizen able to express unique individuality within a shared cultural

value system. Lene Rachel Andersen makes a bold foray into proposing

the concept of the Bildung Rose to represent unity in diversity and nest-

ing humanity in nature, of which we are a part.

A better understanding of the power of Bildung as a unifying force

is essential as humanity exits COVID-19 and as we need to build greater

resilience and solidarity in community evolution as we prepare for fu-

ture pandemics and crises. The concepts of Bildung, Circles of Belonging

and the Bildung Rose promote the possibility for a new brand of national

identity which is centered on a holistic approach to the “self”, “people-

hood” and “community.” An identity built around a compassionate pride

of belonging that is accepting of all cultures and thinking rather than to-

day’s brand of extremist nationalism or populism.

Bildung - Keep Growing is of high relevance to everybody thinking se-

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riously about knowledge exchange, education and life-long learning as

anchors for holistic economic and political development at the communi-

ty, national and global levels.

Reports to the Club of Rome do not necessarily represent the opin-

ion of the Club of Rome as an organization, nor the opinion of all its mem-

bers. The acceptance as a Report to the Club of Rome indicates that the

Club of Rome appreciates and promotes the publication as an important

intellectual contribution.

Sandrine Dixson-Declève Mamphela Ramphele

Co-President, the Club of Rome Co-President, the Club of Rome

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Executive summary

Bildung is moral and emotional maturity. Bildung is also to have the edu-

cation and knowledge necessary to thrive in your society; bildung is to be

deeply embedded in culture and community while having the autonomy

to carve your own path in life. Bildung is always personal and unique.

Bildung is a German word that has no word in English. Beginning in

the 1770s, German philosophers explored bildung as a secular form of

inner development and it became popular among the bourgeoisie.

In Denmark, a pastor realized in the 1830s that the peasants need-

ed bildung too, and he envisioned a new kind of school: the folk-high-

school. In 1851, a Danish teacher, Christen Kold, figured out how to teach

in such a way that young farmhands learned to think for themselves:

he told them moving stories and let them ask questions. Once he had

their attention, he could teach them new farming techniques, science,

philosophy, history, religion, literature, art, economic theory, and political

science.

Norway, Sweden and Finland copied the folk-high-school concept in

the 1860s and by 1900, a critical mass of youngsters in the Nordic coun-

tries had upgraded their skills and their thinking, and the Nordics had

gone from being among the poorest countries in Europe to being among

the richest. This development and the bildung that carried it also meant

that the Nordics made the transition from agricultural feudal societies to

modern, democratic, industrialized nation-states peacefully.

As we are facing new challenges from digitization, globalization, a

pandemic and environmental changes we need bildung for the 21st cen-

tury and the book concludes by exploring what that might look like.

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PrefaceHumanity at a crossroads

Atman, a Sanskrit word, means inner self, spirit or soul, and breath. At-

men, a German word, means to breathe. The connection between the

two words is not a coincidence; both have the same Proto-Indo-European

root. Danish is an Indo-European language too, a Germanic language in

fact, and in Danish, to breathe is ånde, while spirit is ånd. The Hebrew

word ruach means wind, breath, or spirit, and when the Bible opens by

telling that God’s spirit sweeps over the water, it is ruach. When God

threatens to kill all life on Earth in a flood, it is the ruach of all life that is

to disappear. Later in the Bible, ruach comes to mean the individual hu-

man soul, mind, or consciousness, that which is of higher awareness than

mere instinct, that which can contemplate and serve God.

It is perhaps no big wonder that breath, spirit, and consciousness

are connected in the spiritual traditions and in different languages. After

all, our consciousness and life itself are what disappear when our breath-

ing stops.

It is a diabolic irony that through our very breath, humanity is now

connected. Not through wisdom of the spirit, but through a virus; not

through life, but through the risk of death.

While we have created technologies and economic infrastructures

that connect us around the globe, we forgot to upgrade our understand-

ing, our consciousness, our sense of responsibility, and our consciense;

our spirit. We forgot to study, learn, and teach to everybody that which

is at the core and the forefront of human knowledge. We forgot to think,

and we forgot to understand ourselves as connected around the globe

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and to protect life. We also forgot to see ourselves as a part of nature

and to pay heed to the spiritual traditions that, different as they are, all

tell us to treat Earth’s resources with humility and respect. We were poor

stewards of the Earth we inherited; we are poor gardeners.

Sufficient knowledge to understand your circumstances, the emo-

tional maturity to act appropriately in time, and the cultivation to express

how and why are all summed up in one German word: Bildung.

To solve the existential crises we are facing as a species, such as

climate change, mass extinction of species, surveillance capitalism, ar-

tificial intelligence (AI), terrorism, skyrocketing inequality, and financial

collapses—and pandemics such as the COVID-19—we need bildung, and

we need it at a massive scale and fast.

We are the first generation to experience a global disaster unfold

within months, and be able to watch it unfold globally in real time. We are

also the last generation who can claim we had no clue. We are the gener-

ation that will be defining the future for all of humanity. It is our political

and technological choices that will define the climate, the wellbeing of

eco-systems and the technological infrastructure of coming generations.

We have their quality of life, their prosperity, and their level of freedom

in our hands. It is our responsibility. If we choose to implement constant

surveillance everywhere in order to regulate people’s behavior, we will

have forced it upon coming generations; if we choose not to implement

constant surveillance, we will have given coming generations the same

freedom, responsibility, and choice: to take away freedom from future

generations or to keep it. Similarly with nature: if we destroy it, we hand

that destroyed planet over to coming generations; if we save it, we hand

over the responsibility.

Instead of robbing everybody of their freedom, responsibility, and a

green planet, we can mature. We can see ourselves as an integral part of

nature, and we can become responsible. We can promote bildung.

To introduce and explore bildung, and to suggest a path forward

towards a wiser and green planet, this book is comprised of five parts:

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• The human spirit; what makes life meaningful?

• Meaning-making and bildung: emotional development and

the society in which it takes place.

• How Denmark turned bildung into folk-bildung, exported

it to the other Nordic countries, and how this changed the

Nordics.

• More and better bildung; a better understanding, framing

what happened, and making it operational in the 21st century.

• Some personal reflections on the wider implications of bild-

ung.

Bildung is an elusive phenomenon, and I do not suggest that by read-

ing this book, you will have a manual to start a program or a new school,

but I am certain that you will have a new foundation for understanding

our potential as individuals and as a species. I also hope the book will

inspire you to start a conversation about better education, bildung, and

the potential of the human spirit wherever you are.

With this book, I hope to reach those who are interested in the future

of humanity and the wellbeing of our planet. I write with policymakers

and the curious and conscientious citizen in mind, and I aim to write in

plain language though I often use very abstract and academic concepts.

If we are to solve the major crises that we are facing, writing different

books for academics and everybody else will not foster a meaningful con-

versation among us. Facing the gigantic paradigm shift that is necessary if

we are to hand over a habitable planet to our children and grandchildren,

we need shared frames of reference.1

There is no need to try to hide that I am writing from a European

perspective, but I have done my best not to make the book too Eurocen-

tric. However, since the topic of the book originated in Europe, it is hard

to avoid.

1 Speaking of references: In order to increase readability, footnotes and references have been kept to an absolute minimum. There is a literature list at the end of the book and, since the first half of the book is based on The Nordic Secret - A European Story of Beauty and Freedom (Fri Tanke, 2017), there is an online collection of sources by topic, which can be found on the website of that book: https://www.nordicsecret.org/sources-by-chapter/

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I am also writing from a Danish perspective; I am Danish and was

born and raised in Denmark. In my late 20s, I went to the US several

times; I went there as a Dane and returned as a European. There are as-

pects of Denmark that I hate so much that sometimes I just feel like yell-

ing at my country. Our appreciation of mediocracy, for instance, and the

ever-present “hygge,” which became “Word of the Year 2016,” but which

is really just a way of dying without living first.

On the other hand, I have to admit: Denmark has it pretty much fig-

ured out. In international surveys, the Danes are the happiest and have

low corruption and the highest levels of trust in other people and in pub-

lic institutions, and Denmark is amongst the top countries for business.

As my Swedish colleague, Tomas Björkman, and I explored in our

book The Nordic Secret, the secret behind Denmark and the other Nordic

countries is: bildung.

Thank yousTwo people, in particular, have contributed to this book. My colleague

Tomas Björkman with whom I wrote The Nordic Secret – A European Story

of Beauty and Freedom (Fri Tanke, 2017); many of the core insights from

that book are also in this book. My colleague Mette Hvid Brockmann

with whom I work every day at Nordic bildung and who is also my editor.

There is no need to be melodramatic, but I could not have written this

book without you.

This book has also benefitted tremendously from comments and

input from Stefan Bergheim, Sturla Bjerkaker, Bo Heimann, Gregg

Henriques, Christer Nylander, Zak Stein, Ane Storgaard, and Ernst von

Weizäcker. Thank you all for your feedback.

Lene Rachel Andersen,

Copenhagen, May 2020

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Food for thoughtWhen was the last time you made somebody grow?

How did that feel?

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the human spiritMaking life meaningful

Why are we here?

And now that we are, what should we make of it?

The first question has intrigued humans, probably for as long as there

have been humans around. Every culture on Earth, including the smallest

and least technologically advanced hunter-gatherer tribes, have creation

myths explaining how the world was created and why. The second ques-

tion is rather new, because throughout the majority of human history, the

struggle for survival was occupying everybody, and what to make of life

was rather obvious: survive and make sure your children do too!

Today, at least in the wealthy West, both questions hit us differently.

To some, the first question has a religious answer: God put us here,

and life came with obligations and moral value. To others, the question

has a rather bleak answer: DNA emerged, mutated, and evolved to build

cells around itself. Cells evolved into multicellular life, vertebrates, pri-

mates, and eventually humans; life has no intrinsic value; we just happen

to be here because previous generations reproduced well and survived

successfully. If there is to be any deeper meaning to life, we must create

it ourselves. Which leads us to the second question:

What to make of life? Once survival has been taken care of, what’s

the point? We find perhaps the oldest known struggle with this existential

emptiness in Ecclesiastes: “Utter futility!—said Koheleth—Utter futility! All

is futile!” and then it goes downhill from there… 2,500-year-old nihilism in

the face of life’s meaninglessness. In other words, if life is to be meaning-

ful, we have to make it so!

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With productivity as high as it is in the most technologically advanced

societies, we are about to find ourselves in the existentially awkward situ-

ation that we are no longer necessary for our own survival. Hypothetical-

ly, robots could produce everything. Life is thus in our own hands now,

much necessity is gone, and it is up to us to make it meaningful, find

a purpose, do what is important and fulfilling, and engage ourselves in

what makes us thrive and feel lasting meaning and joy.

There are two major obstacles to this: our inner world and person-

al choices, and the outer world that defines a number of circumstances

over which the individual has little or no control.

We, therefore, need to see ourselves both as individuals with au-

tonomy and as beings, who are integral to and embedded in something

bigger, be it family, community, country, or the globe as a whole. That we

are integral to a community or system means that even though we may

feel that we are in no control, we still contribute to there being the com-

munity or the system. Without our being in it, the community or system

would be different. Maybe just a tiny bit, but still different.

This double existence, as both autonomous and integral, can be

weaker or stronger.

We can be so lacking autonomy that the only truly individual aspect

of our life is our bodily functions; this is the condition of the newborn, but

it is also the fate of the concentration camp prisoner.

Detachment from others may mean that we are not an integral part

of any family or community. If this deprivation happens in early child-

hood, few develop properly. Later, we can be so lacking connectedness

to others that we have no meaningful or true relationships at all; it is pos-

sible to be so emotionally, culturally, and morally detached from others

that we despair. This may happen due to tragic personal loss, but it may

also be the fate of the individual in a concentration camp or authoritarian

system where no personal relationships or autonomy are allowed. Under

these circumstances, existence is neither autonomous nor integral to hu-

man life; it is rather the absence of both.

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In some respects, this loneliness and detachment from others, from

culture, from shared morality, norms, and emotions, is what we have

done to ourselves, to our societies, and our educational systems in the

postmodern West. Liberalism and capitalism at their best set people free

and create wealth; at their worst and with no correction from tradition

and morality, they pit us against each other and break down the social

fabric and our symbolic worlds. Schools that are reduced to PISA and

other tests, to measurable indicators, to constant competition, and to

“teaching factories” producing nothing but a competitive workforce are

starving the human soul. They are detaching children and young adults

from that which makes life worth living. Autonomy is squelched; attach-

ment does not fit into a spreadsheet.

The far more meaningful, rich, fulfilling, and fun alternative is, of

course, high degrees of both autonomy and integration. Upbringing,

schools, communities, and societies that develop that which is unique

in each child, that create strong social bonds, and that foster indepen-

dence and connectedness to both people, culture, and society, provide

scaffolding for meaningful growth. Likewise, meaningful is the adult

life in which we have the ability to be in charge of our own life-situ-

ation, where we can seek and access information freely and express

ourselves. A life of autonomy and integration is a life where we are

free to enjoy the arts and aesthetics of our own and other cultures,

their richness and depth, to provide for ourselves in the surrounding

economy, to study and learn, to develop a moral and ethical backbone

and the ability to speak up for oneself and on behalf of others, to know

our ‘place’ in history and have a sense of rootedness in the collective

journey of our country and of humankind. To be empowered and ac-

tive as a citizen, to engage in the organization of one’s society. It is

deep integration into the social fabric, which provides all those enrich-

ing elements in one’s life. It is freedom, obligations, independence, in-

terdependence, and responsibilities at the same time. Furthermore, it

is bildung.

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About bildungThere is no English word for Bildung, so the German original will have

to do. (You pronounce it bild-ung; the ‘ung’ part with the same short ‘oo’

as in the name of the Swiss psychologist Jung.) It comes from the word

Bild, which means image, and originally referred to forming oneself in

the image of God or Christ. In the mid-1700s, it became a secular phe-

nomenon, and the Bild one was aiming for, was the personal image of

one’s fully developed self. It was the German Idealist philosophers of the

late Enlightenment and the early Romantic era, such as Johann Gottfreid

Herder, Friedrich Schiller, and G.W.F. Hegel, who explored this kind of

secular bildung in the decades around 1800.

Bild-ung is thus both a formation process and the result of a forma-

tion process. The reason for not just using the English word formation, is

that bildung comes with a rich philosophical tradition.

Bildung represents a complexity that makes it hard to fully grasp.

Even to Germans who, for the past couple of generations, have reduced

the word to mean no more than education in the most ordinary sense of

the word: the school stuff that can be measured in a test.

About the book and our opportunitiesBecause bildung is both a foreign word in the English language and an

elusive concept, this book has several goals:

• To briefly trace the Greek, Czech, Swiss, French, Scottish,

and British roots of the otherwise very German concept of

bildung, and to thus show that bildung is an aspect of the

European heritage that we have forgotten.

• To explore the concept of bildung and present it to people

outside the Germanic tradition.

• To re-introduce it into the German vernacular in its original,

complex sense.

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• To share how the Danes transformed bildung into folk-bild-

ung in the 1800s and laid the foundation for the success of

the Nordic countries.

• To show that bildung is an essential human phenomenon

that we overlook at our own peril, but which points towards

a better future.

As these lines are written, it is still too early to say what even the

short-term outcome of the COVID-19 virus and the lockdown will be, but

one lesson already learned is this: when governments really want some-

thing, they can find the money to pay for it.

Folk-bildung may be the best way to restore our societies and their

economies in the aftermath of the pandemic.

Every human being has the potential for autonomy and deep inte-

gration, the capacity for emancipation and responsibility; everybody has

the potential and deserves access to bildung. That ought to be our overall

political endeavor.

Food for thoughtWhen was the last time you changed your mind on a political issue?

What did you fear the most: Being wrong after you changed your mind

or looking silly?